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DUBAI: Emirates NBD, one of the leading banks in the region, continues to receive industry recognition for its leadership in digital innovation, winning three awards at the recently held Infosys Finacle Client Innovation Awards 2019.

The awards recognise Emirates NBD’s best in-class capabilities in cloud innovation, API architecture and financial platforms, which are continually being enhanced under the bank’s AED 1 billion digital transformation program.

Emirates NBD won “Best API-led innovation” for its ‘Bawaba’ initiative to build a comprehensive ‘Banking-as-a-Service’ platform. This included launching a dedicated API initiative in 2018, as part of a wider ambition to make cloud an integral part of the enterprise’s landscape. In just 10 months, over 250 APIs have been built independently by Emirates NBD with an ambition to build over 600 by end-2020. Through this, Emirates NBD can deliver rapid innovation through agile, scalable development internally while enabling new FinTech partnerships and distribution models externally.

Additionally, Emirates NBD received two runner-up awards from Infosys Finacle. In the Accelerated Transformation category, Emirates NBD was recognized for its ‘Core Consolidation program.’ This three-year Finacle initiative will see all Emirates NBD entities and markets consolidated onto one, updated version of Finacle by 2020, starting with Singapore in November last year. In doing so, new financial payments features offered by Finacle can be seamlessly and rapidly adopted across all markets to enhance the customer experience while driving IT operational efficiency and agility.

An additional runner-up award was received in the Process Innovation category, following Emirates NBD’s introduction of a comprehensive VAT implementation program. Delivered in just three-months and leveraging Finacle capabilities, it ensured a smooth facilitation of all VAT requirements for customers following the UAE’s introduction of VAT last year.

Commenting on the awards, Abdulla Qassem, Group Chief Operating Officer at Emirates NBD, said: “Emirates NBD is proud to receive these awards from Infosys Finacle. This reflects the continued success of the bank’s digitisation agenda and our steadfast commitment to continuously improving our IT applications, architecture and cloud capabilities to drive internal IT agility and operational efficiency, while providing the best digital innovation for our customers.”

The Infosys Finacle Client Innovation Awards have been instituted to recognise and celebrate banks that deliver breakthrough innovations in banking products, customer service, process design and distribution channels capitalizing on Finacle solutions. The award program attracted over 250 nominations across categories this year, making it one of the most fiercely contested Infosys Finacle Client Innovation Awards ever. A rigorous multi-level evaluation spanning over two months led to recognising the best innovation stories from the nominations. News Desk